


all that we were and all that we could be

by aucoventry



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Depression, Gen, Hiatus, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Magical Realism, References to Depression, Still Life with Tornado AU, Stream of Consciousness, a liberal dollop of fudge, whatever that means in RPF
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 09:51:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22463296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aucoventry/pseuds/aucoventry
Summary: Pete Wentz runs into his eleven-year-old self on a Sunday, when he goes to the bookstore to buy a ballpen.
Relationships: Patrick Stump & Pete Wentz, Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz
Comments: 18
Kudos: 37





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I was laid up sick in bed for several weeks last year, and during that time I a) consumed so much Fall Out Boy content that I almost did not recover, and b) finally read Still Life With Tornado by A.S. King, and at some point I guess my brain thought, hey, what if we smush the two things together. So now you get this…very weird thing.
> 
> I’m figuring this fic is set sometime in 2011-2012, but I didn’t do as much research as I usually do for this, so—sorry, I fudged things liberally. But thanks to EGT for entertaining all my Peterick questions way back when, and to all my writing friends for sprinting with me as I got this done.
> 
> Ho boy. here we go

_we went from strangers to lovers to strangers in a lifetime_

\- Katy Perry

_Is the new you the stranger? Or is the stranger the person you leave behind?_

\- Rebecca Stead

\--

  1. _ sunday_

Pete Wentz runs into his eleven-year-old self on a Sunday, when he goes to the bookstore to buy a ballpen.

Before that, though, Pete is in his apartment watering his succulents, because he’s the type of guy who owns succulents now, apparently. He has an aloe vera plant and a bear’s paw and a Mexican snowball—except that this is his second batch of succulents, because even though he followed the instructions about watering them only once every couple of weeks, his first batch of succulents still died for some reason.

Now, Pete frowns at the aloe’s drooping leaves, yellow at the tips. Maybe it’s just the weather. Not enough sunlight these days, even if he does put them by the window. He watered all of them yesterday, but he tips the glass of water over each of them again, just to be sure. Watches it sink into the soil, a slow darkening around the roots.

And then Pete hovers over his withering plants for a couple of minutes, before he realizes that it’s not like they’re going to perk up and get better right before his eyes, and then he thinks, this is ridiculous, he should really be trying to write a new song for the LP like he promised himself he would this weekend.

So Pete takes a deep breath to clear his mind and sits down at his actual desk in his actual chair and opens his actual notebook, but when he starts rummaging around for an actual pen he can’t find one, or a pencil, or a marker, and so that means he has to get out of the chair and check in every single room to see if there are any pens _anywhere _in this house. And it turns out there are not, so Pete has no choice but to go out to the bookstore to buy one, which means the songwriting has to be put on hold, and all because he somehow doesn’t own a single fucking pen.

_And it’s going to rain,_ Pete thinks, looking out the window, and then he grabs a hoodie and goes out to the bookstore.

When he’s really, really in the zone, it’s not like Pete actually cares about what he uses to write with. Andy used to like to tell the story about how Pete once got the idea for the perfect chorus while he was in the middle of paying the pizza delivery guy, and he had to ask the guy if he could borrow a pen so he could write it down on the top of the pizza box before he forgot it. While the poor guy was still just standing there, holding the box, until Pete was finished.

Or like the other day, when Pete got—not a chorus, but half of something, a line or two—and Bebe saw the look on his face and handed him her eyeliner pencil so he could scribble it on the back of his hand.

Pete wound up washing it off five minutes later when he went to the bathroom, though. It hadn’t turned out to be anything good. Or even usable. Happens sometimes. Been happening a lot lately.

But anyway. Since he’s already here, in the bookstore, and it took him a twenty-minute ride to get here, Pete figures he can afford to take his time and make it worth it. Choose one of those good, acid-free, archival quality pens. So that a hundred years from now, long after Pete is dead, whoever’s writing his biography can dig up his notebook, and maybe the words in it will be shitty but at least they won’t have bled through the pages on both sides.

Pete rounds the corner to get to the stationery aisle, to see if they have any of those Japanese fineliner things, and that’s when he sees him. Bouncing one of those little rubber balls they keep in boxes next to the registers against the shelf, _thunk, _jumping up high to catch it, then bouncing it off the floor so it ricochets off the shelf again, _ka-thunk. _His tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration, his hair still curly and almost baby-soft. His arms and elbows still skinned from that time he totally ate it when he fell off his bike, the day after his parents gave it to him for his eleventh birthday.

Pete Wentz, eleven years old, standing in the middle of the Barnes and Noble.

“Hey,” Pete says. “You planning on buying that? Or are you just gonna mess around in here all day?”

Eleven-year-old Pete startles, loses his rhythm. The ball bounces off the shelf and hits the one behind him, knocking a jar of Sharpies to the floor. The jar cracks.

“Shit,” the kid says. His voice high and defiant, but a little frightened behind it. Jesus, was his voice ever really that high?

“I got it.” Pete kneels and starts picking up the Sharpies. “Just go put the ball back, okay?”

The kid obeys, scuttling off down the aisle to the registers. When he gets back, his hands are stuck into his pockets, and he’s puffing air into his cheeks and blowing it out slowly as he stares at Pete. “You know who I am?” Pete asks him.

The kid rolls his eyes. “Duh.”

Pete rolls his eyes too. “Okay, geez. I was just asking.” He thinks for a moment. The two of them stand there, regarding each other.

“You hungry?” Pete asks finally, and his younger self shrugs and says, “I could eat.”

Eleven-year-old Pete—he refuses to think of the kid as Young Pete, because then what is _he,_ Old Pete?—seems to have a problem with standing still. He keeps hopping from one foot to the other while they’re in line for hotdogs, shaking his arms out, scuffing his shoe against the ground.

“Don’t do that,” Pete says automatically when he sees the kid drawing hard circles on the sidewalk with the toe of his sneaker. “You’ll wear them out, and then Mom’s gonna yell at you.”

Shorter Pete scowls, but he stops. Pete’s at the front of the line now, so he gets both their hotdogs and walks the kid over to a picnic table and sits them down with them.

“Pickles are gross,” the kid says as soon as he’s handed his hotdog. Lifting the long pickle slices gingerly out of the hotdog bun, he drops them onto the table.

Pete plucks the pickles off the table and reassigns them to his own hotdog. “What are you, a caveman?” he asks, and then he realizes that is word-for-word what his mom would have said, and now on top of everything else he’s apparently turning into his mother, and _that_ is possibly the most horrifying thing that’s happened today. So Pete tells himself sternly, _NO MORE MOMMING, _and chews on his bite of hotdog. But now that he’s determined not to lecture the kid, he can’t think of anything to say to him.

Eleven-year-old Pete takes a huge bite out of his own hotdog, and gets mustard all over his chin.

What had he been like, at eleven? Why can’t he remember anything specific about himself—what he’d talk about, what he liked, what he got excited for? The only thing Pete can approximate is that was the time when he was way into soccer, but so were all the kids at that age. “So,” he says, deciding it’s better than nothing. “You’re on the soccer team, right? How’s that going?”

“Yeah,” the kid says with his mouth full, then swallows and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. “It’s okay. Well, except everyone else is like, super white. I mean, everywhere else, too.” He shrugs. “It doesn’t bother me or anything, it’s just, if you think about it I don’t really fit in. ‘Cause I’m a mutt.”

He says it in such a matter-of-fact tone that Pete is stunned. “Where the hell did you hear that? Who said that to you?”

“I dunno.” The kid shrugs again. “Nobody.”

Pete pauses, because he remembers now. He’d kept to himself a lot, as a kid; at the time he’d honestly preferred it that way. It made things easier. Left him to invent worlds in his own head, with no one to tell him he couldn’t. “It doesn’t matter, you know,” Pete says, softly. “It’s not gonna matter in—in the end.”

Another bite. The kid still intends on talking with his mouth full, but Pete isn’t going to say anything. “Whaddya mean?”

“Well—“ Pete hesitates. “You’re gonna be in a band, for one thing.”

The kid’s eyes grow wide. “I get to be in a _band?”_

“Yeah.” Pete offers him a rough, clumsy smile, while thinking it feels pretty freaking amazing to be able to tell a kid this and know it’s actually going to come true for him. “You play bass. In a bunch of bands actually, you get to be in like, five bands.”

The kid stares. “At the _same time?”_ Pete shakes his head. “Oh. So what’s the one you’re in now?”

“It’s called Black Cards,” Pete tells him. “But the one I was in for a long time before this one was, it was called Fall Out Boy.”

The kid snorts.

“Hey, don’t knock it. We sounded pretty good—well, I always thought so, anyway.” Pete peels some of the hotdog wrapper away, turns it this way and that while he figures out where to bite next so he won’t make a mess. “Best part though…I was in it with my best friend.”

The kid’s expression changes. Interest. “You have a best friend?”

_Not anymore, _Pete thinks. But what Pete says, quietly, is, “Yeah. He’s—he’s pretty cool.”

“Who is he? Do I know him already?” The kid is clearly running through all the people he knows in his mind, wondering which of them it is.

“Not yet. You meet him later. Much later.” Pete bites the side of his tongue for a moment. “His name’s Patrick,” he says finally. “He’s a fucking incredible singer, he just never wants to admit it, and he’s hella smart, and weird, and funny, and determined, and _brave,_ and…”

He doesn’t know how to end that sentence. Younger him doesn’t seem to notice. “What happened?” the kid asks. “To your band?”

“We broke up,” Pete says simply, looking up. The sky overhead is getting darker. “Hey, it’s about to rain,” he says, and thumbs over his shoulder. “Do you want to come wait it out with me for a while? I have videogames and stuff.”

“Nah. I’ve got places to be.” The kid swings his legs out over the bench and leaps to his feet. He pulls something out of his pocket and bounces it smoothly against the bench and the corner of the table, _ka-thunk, _before grabbing it out of the air. The rubber ball.

“Hey,” Pete says. “Did you _steal _that?”

A grin splits the younger Pete’s face. “Thanks for the hotdog,” he says, and runs off. It’s a while before Pete thinks to get up and try to look around the corner to see where the kid went, but by then he’s long gone.

And it’s not until Pete gets back home that he realizes he completely forgot to buy a pen.

So he opens his laptop instead, thinking he can try freewriting in a text file for a while. He ignores the five different documents full of stray lines saved on his desktop and starts a fresh one—and he knows it’s probably a cliché to stare at the blinking cursor on the empty page for as long as he does, but he does it anyway. Then he gets up to make a cup of coffee, and then he sits back down, and somehow manages to finish drinking all of the coffee without adding a single word to the blank document. And Pete’s hand is hovering over the keyboard and he thinks he just needs to type _something, _so he brings one finger down on the closest letter, J, and keeps it there, unspooling a string of _jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj. _Then he tries to think of words that start with the letter J so at least this won’t have been a complete waste of time, but for some reason the only word he can think of is _jambalaya, _and that’s not a very good beginning for a song.

Then he thinks about emailing Patrick. Not about what happened today, but just—to email him. Pete used to always send him long, rambly emails for no particular reason; mostly when he couldn’t sleep, often even when Patrick was snoring in his bunk just five feet away.

There’s a dull roar outside the window. The rain’s coming down now—gray and relentless, washing the city clean. Or trapping it inside itself.

He can’t, Pete thinks. He can’t email Patrick, or text or call him, or go see him. Not anymore.

Pete closes his laptop. He looks out the window, and it rains, and rains.

\--

  1. _ monday_

It’s Monday and the band has recording time, so Pete has to get up even though getting up sucks.

“My plants are dying again,” is the first thing Pete says when he walks into the studio. He holds out his phone to show Bebe a photo.

Bebe cranes her head around to peer at the screen. It’s her fault he started with the succulents thing in the first place; she has a cactus she carries around with her sometimes. In her purse, because she’s like that. “I think you’re still watering them too much,” she says. “Didn’t I tell you that you can’t do that either? You’ll drown them.”

“I am following,” Pete says somewhat haughtily, “the instructions I found on Google.”

Bebe sighs from somewhere deep in her bones. “You don’t Google, babe. You just have to _listen_ to them.”

“To the plants,” Pete says, trying not to make his skepticism audible.

“Yes, Pete, the plants. Because sometimes what they’re telling you is they’re fine, but you don’t believe them. Just _look_ at them. Pay attention.” Bebe claps him on the shoulder, her eyes serious. “And trust your gut. Then you’ll know what to do.”

Pete looks down at the picture on his phone helplessly.

“Guys,” Nate says, sticking his head out of the booth. “Ready to go? We gotta clear out of here by four, someone else booked it for the evening.”

“Yeah. Yes.” Pete shoves his phone into his back pocket. “We’re ready.”

For the next couple of hours, they do takes of the two new songs for the LP. These ones are almost purely instrumental, with only a few lines and some vocalizing by Bebe, so Pete doesn’t have to worry—he can lose himself in the music for a while.

And the thing is, Pete really hasn’t been looking back. Pete likes the band he’s got. He likes Bebe, and Nate, and Spencer. They’re doing something different. The fans like what they do. Pete’s proud of it. He’s happy.

But maybe it’s something about this studio they’re recording in, something about the color of the lights, or the way the sound bounces off the walls—but Pete’s never been able to concentrate properly in it. Sometimes when they’re recording, it feels like he’s not really there. They’ll launch into one song and he’ll start floating up out of his body without him even realizing it, his hands going through the motions without him.

Sometimes he can go through an entire session like that without anyone catching on, but not today. Pete stumbles over the same section three times in a row, his fingers slipping and losing the rhythm. The third time is when he really feels it, feels everyone looking at him, and the mistake suddenly looms enormous in the room around them.

“Shit,” Pete blurts out, passing a hand over his face. “Sorry, guys.”

“Dude.” Spencer lowers his sticks. “Are you okay?”

Embarrassment curls around Pete’s gut. “Yeah, I’m fine, I’m just—I didn’t get much sleep, I guess.” He slings his guitar back over his shoulder. “One more. I’ll get it for sure this time, I swear.”

But outside, their sound engineer is shaking her head. “Sorry, Pete,” she says. “You have to start clearing out, the other guys are going to be here soon.” She offers him a consoling smile. “But I can try stitching together some of the files. If it’s really unusable, you can do it again next time, it’s not a problem.”

That makes Pete feel even worse. But he nods, and starts packing up.

A light punch on his arm. “Coffee?” Bebe asks.

Pete nods again. “Coffee.”

They wind up at Starbucks because Bebe wants matcha, and the barista spells Pete’s name _Pheet _on his cup. “That’s new,” Pete says, looking at it as he pushes the door open. “Makes me feel like some rare Neopet.”

Bebe snorts. “If you were a Neopet I’d give you straight to the pound.”

“Ouch.” Pete takes a long sip and lets the coffee sear a line down his gullet. The heat is soothing, with the air so nippy and sharp around them.

“I’m just kidding.” Bebe tucks her free hand into the kangaroo pocket of her oversized hoodie. “But I’d still take a Halloween paintbrush to that ugly mug.”

After they’re seated outside, Bebe asks, “So how are the lyrics going?” She pops the lid off her cup, slowly stirring the cream into her matcha latte with her straw. “The guys have been wondering too, they just didn’t want to ask you.”

Pete frowns. He doesn’t like the idea of being tiptoed around, even if people are doing it out of consideration for him. “They could have asked me. I mean, they’re allowed to ask me.”

Bebe shrugs. “Well, I’m asking now. Not to pressure you or anything, it’s just—you kept saying you had something, and then you stopped talking about it, so we…wanted to know if everything was okay.”

Pete takes a deep breath. “I do have stuff,” he begins. “A lot of it. It’s just kind of—you know how sometimes when you try to build a sandcastle, it won’t hold a shape?” He gestures vaguely in the air. “And you don’t know what it is, you’re trying to like, wet the sand, and pat it down, and you can even kinda imagine what you want it to look like in the end—but it’s the sand, it’s just not sticking and you don’t know why?” Pete blows his exhale out through his teeth. “It’s like that. I don’t know, it’s really fucking weird.”

“Hey, no,” Bebe says. She tilts her head. “It’s okay. That’s really just how it is sometimes.”

_Not for me, _Pete thinks. Writing never felt like this to him before. Not even back when he was on like five different kinds of meds and depressed out of his fucking mind. Even back then, there had been something there—something _true_ to mine, to get his arms into all the way up to his elbows and feel, before closing his fists around the raw diamonds and pulling them up.

But this, now, is something entirely foreign to Pete. Like he’s suddenly on a different planet and just brushing dust off the surface of the ground everywhere with his hands, but not knowing how to even begin to break through.

“It’ll be okay,” Bebe repeats, scraping her chair back, and she sounds way more certain than Pete feels. “I promise.”

“Yeah.” Pete tries to smile. “Thanks.”

Bebe looks like she wants to say something else, but she hesitates. Then she asks, “Need my help? I can take a look at some stuff, if you need me to.”

Pete’s tried co-writing lyrics with Bebe before. And she’s great, she really is, but they don’t work together like that. Their minds, their internal languages, are too different. Different gears. “Nah, I got it,” he says. “Probably just need to take more long walks in the park. Pet some strangers’ dogs, skip rocks…you know. Inspiration-fueling shit.”

Bebe nods. “Get out of your head, Pheet,” she tells him over her shoulder as she’s leaving. “And stop watering your plants.”

With Bebe gone, Pete goes to the park and lobs a couple of rocks into the water, and meets a whole bunch of dogs, including a really friendly pit bull who puts her paws right up on Pete’s shoulders and washes his face thoroughly with her tongue. He’s so engrossed in turning and waving goodbye to the pit bull that he runs right smack into someone, their shoulder colliding with his collarbone in a sharp explosion of pain.

_“Jesus,_ man—“ Pete yelps—and then he looks up, and it’s twenty-one-year-old Pete, with his bangs hanging into his eyes and tepid coffee all over his jacket.

“Whoa,” twenty-one-year-old Pete says, looking at him, jacket dripping onto the concrete path. “That hair’s really somethin’.”

“Pot and kettle,” Pete says, running his hand through his own hair. “Or is it pot and pot? I don’t…really know how this works.”

The younger Pete shrugs, shoulders high, palms open. “Hey, me either.” He chews on his bottom lip, dark-ringed eyes wide. “Sorry I ran into you, by the way. Brain’s kinda…somewhere else right now, I guess.”

“Me too.” Pete hesitates. “Trying to write a song?”

The younger Pete grins dorkily. “You too, huh?”

“Yep.” Pete crushes his now-empty coffee cup in his hand. “Well, if you need a quiet place to work,” he says. “Wanna come see where I live?”

“This’d be super creepy if I weren’t you,” the younger Pete says, trekking after him. “I’m just saying.”

Pete-21 (Pete has decided to think of himself as _Pete Prime_) has no trouble making himself at home in Pete’s house. “Sweet,” he says, collapsing onto the leather sofa with his shoes on.

Pete tosses him a change of shirt—one of his old Shelter tees, something that Pete-21 would find familiar—and settles into his desk chair. “What’re you working on?”

“A billion things,” Pete-21 says cryptically. He pulls the shirt on, then tugs his crumpled tiny notebook out of his back pocket, and Pete feels an instant wave of nostalgia when he sees it. Stretching out, the younger Pete jiggles his foot and opens the notebook with one hand, bringing a pen to his mouth with the other to chew on the cap. “How old are you, anyway?” he asks out of the blue.

“Thirty-one,” Pete says, feeling somewhat thrown off balance.

Pete-21 nods slowly, like, _huh. _Then he goes back to his notebook.

_This kid,_ Pete thinks. He’s been catching glimpses that he remembers—the fidgeting, the way he stares up at the ceiling and moves his lips silently when he’s thinking. But a million other little things—the self-conscious way the younger Pete shoves his hand through his hair, the small pursed-lips thing he does with his mouth when he’s trying not to laugh—are completely unrecognizable when he looks at himself from the outside. Is he so different now? Pete wonders.

He knows it’s no good trying to talk to Pete-21 when he’s writing, so Pete swivels back to face his own laptop. Cracks open a new document; tries to let everything from the day—the coffee, the damp gray-greenness of the park, the ghost in his house and the odd restless feeling that’s been circling somewhere over his head—settle into his bones so he can focus it outwards, into words.

Pete puts his hands over the keyboard and writes, _they all Babylon but I’m the one in ruins. try to build it back up and in the end you’ll still rue this. slow down, Gemini, you’ll only get stuck. toss out your tiger eyes, they’ve run out of luck._

He keeps going. _letting people down is my thing so find yourself a new gig, this town ain’t big enough for the two of us. anything you say can and will be held against you so only say my name. say my name, i just wanna hear you say, i’d trade all my tomorrows for just one yesterday_

Pete writes a whole page of this, and then he sits back and looks at it, rearranging the lines a little bit to try to feel like they make more sense, and thinks, _you’re fine, actually. _He’s not _not _writing, after all; he’s got pages and pages to prove it. He wonders why that doesn’t make him feel any better.

There’s a soft shuffling behind him, and Pete turns his head. Pete-21 is standing there, leaning in to read over his shoulder. “Wow,” he remarks, reaching over Pete’s hand to scroll through the file. “You’re kind of a mess, huh?”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?” Pete asks, suddenly oddly irritated with the kid. He angles his shoulder to try and make Pete-21 back off. “I’ve always written this way. You should know.”

“Yeah, but—“ Pete-21 points at the screen. “You’re kinda just saying the same thing over and over? All of these lines and paragraphs here, they feel like you’re just—screaming.”

Pete frowns. “I am not.” But he looks at the document again and realizes the kid’s right, and that just pisses him off more. “So what, you wanna take a crack at this?” he asks, instead of acknowledging it. He gestures at the laptop. “Be my guest, man.”

Confidently, Pete-21 swoops down and picks up the laptop, and returns to the sofa with it. Watching him, Pete feels annoyingly out of his depth all of a sudden, in his own house, in his own life. “Want to swap?” he asks. “I’ve showed you mine—you can show me yours?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got a lock on my stuff, it’s cool.” Tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, Pete-21 hits the backspace key repeatedly before starting to type. “Depression’s a bitch, but it’s given me a hell of a lot of ammo, you know?” He grins and laughs a little, and continues writing.

Pete studies the kid on his sofa. He understands it, now. Why back when his depression was at his worst, what he heard from his family and his friends over and over was, _I’m sorry. I didn’t know. _Because seeing his younger self from the outside, Pete never would have guessed it if he hadn’t already been there. Twenty-one-year-old Pete is slapdash and goofy and cocksure, and even when he talks about being messed up, he does it in an almost casual, offhanded way, like he’s trying to show he’s got a firm grip on it.

It’s strange. To realize you were even better at hiding things than you thought you were. Pete doesn’t know if he should feel proud, or sad, or a little of both.

He doesn’t know if he should tell the younger Pete that in a few years’ time, he will feel a despair and a noise and an emptiness so deep that for a while, he won’t want to be around anymore. And it’ll feel like it’ll never end, but it will—but even if Pete knows that now, he knows there’s no explaining it to himself at twenty-one. He remembers that much—no amount of explaining or caring or wanting him to just _be okay,_ from anyone, would have flipped the switch in his brain. Pete had had to do it himself; claw his way out of it one inch at a time.

Pete gets up and goes to the kitchen and makes two mugs of hot tea, and sets one down on the coffee table next to his younger self without saying a word.

About half an hour later, Pete-21 returns the laptop. “I did what I could,” he says, and bounces off to inspect the succulents.

Feeling almost nervous about it, Pete takes a look at what the other Pete has done. But it’s good—he’s stuck some of the lines together into the rough shape of a song, and with a masterful touch, gentled them just the tiniest fraction. Sanded down and reworded some of the ugliest, sharpest parts so that even though the ugliness is still showing, there’s a new clearheadedness about it.

Pete puts the laptop down. “Thanks,” he says. “I think I get it now.”

Pete-21 is crouching by the bear’s paw, poking it warily. “It’s okay to scream, but just, like, save that shit for your diary, you know?” He picks up the plastic cup of water and douses the plant. “The stuff you put out there—maybe it’s not all gonna be sugar and rainbows, but it’s still gotta go down smooth. Be poetry, at least. You know?”

Pete feels a combination of grudging admiration and fondness, for his younger self. “Yeah. You’re a good writer,” he says.

“I know!” Pete-21 looks up and sighs noisily. “I’ve tried to tell them, but they just don’t _get_ it,” he says, and Pete realizes with a jolt that he’s talking about the others. About Joe, Andy, and Patrick. “But they’re gonna come around,” Pete-21 continues, watering the aloe. “Once we’re on the same page—we’re going to make some good fucking music. I can feel it.”

“You will,” Pete says before he can even think about it.

Looking satisfied, Pete-21 straightens up, and retrieves his empty mug from the coffee table. “Yeah,” he says as he starts to take it to the sink. “That’s what I thought.”

Pete remembers all too well what songwriting with Patrick was like. They fought over everything in the beginning—like, _everything._ It took them a while to figure out it was because Patrick wasn’t really interested in what words meant, only their rhythms and how they sounded, and Pete wrote lyrics because he had things he needed to say, even if other people didn’t always understand them.

“Your lyrics _suck,” _he’d told Patrick frequently, even though that wasn’t true; Patrick’s lyrics hadn’t sucked, they’d just been different from what Pete was envisioning. For the first time, Pete had had such a clear idea of what their songs could be, of what the _band_ could be. He just needed them to _see_ it.

It wasn’t hard to see why Patrick got fed up before he got it. “If they suck so much, then _you_ write them, I don’t fucking care,” he snapped finally one day, but not before throwing a notebook at Pete’s head. And Pete had, and then after a thousand more shouting matches and unspoken reconciliations and late working nights, he and Patrick finally found their rhythm, learned to listen to each other and fit around each other, and Pete thought, _yes. _Finally someone who clicked. Finally someone he felt—made for.

That was back when the four of them were still sleeping on the floor of some random girl’s apartment, and eating nothing but PB&J’s made out of the loaves of bread the studio gave them money for every day. Pete’s life felt so tiny then, and yet in spite of that, or maybe because of it, everything in it—every note they chose, every line of every single song they wrote—felt so monumentally important to him. Like this was their one shot and they had to get it _right. _

All of that, feeling that, was tough. But once they got past it, once they knew who they were and what they were all like together—Pete thought they could get through anything. From then on, Pete remembers every time they stepped onstage, remembers looking towards the light to see Patrick standing there singing the words he’d written for him, _me and Pete in the wake of Saturday—_and feeling a warm rush every single time because that was how he thought it was always going to be, him and Patrick. On top of the world.

Pete remembers a point early on, too, when he’d tried to quit the band. He and Patrick had just had a fight about something stupid and hadn’t made up yet, and they were all riding in the car with an awkward, heavy silence weighing over them—and suddenly Pete felt like he couldn’t do it anymore, that it was all too much. So Pete said _fuck this,_ and opened the car door and got out, and he went home, sure it was over, that he was done.

And then Patrick called him on the phone later that night. “We’re not gonna be a band without you,” he said. “We talked about it. We’re only going to go ahead with this if you come back.”

Pete frowned. “You trying to blackmail me, Stump?”

“No, I’m just informing you,” Patrick replied evenly. “It’s totally up to you. You can stay or go, no hard feelings. But me—all I know is, I’m not doing this without you.”

Pete pressed his forehead against the wall. Closed his eyes. “What do you think I should do?” he asked. Meaning, _do you want me back?_

Patrick paused. “I think you should do whatever you think will make you happy,” he said.

Pete came back.

Pete orders a large pizza for dinner, mostly meat but with bell peppers and onions so no one can say he isn’t eating vegetables—and between him and Pete-21, they demolish it. They play Smash Bros for a while (Pete-21 wins), and then Pete brings him a pillow and a blanket so he can sleep on the couch. “What?” Pete-21 asks as Pete sets the blanket down.

Pete chucks the pillow at him. “What’s what?”

Pete-21 cocks a brow, but he’s grinning. “I dunno. You looked like you were about to give me a hug, or something.”

“No.” Pete pauses. “Do you want me to?”

“Gross.” Pete-21 lies down and rolls over.

And then Pete goes to his room and lies down on top of the covers staring at the ceiling, watching the moonlight making the shadows move, and thinking about his songs and what it is he’s really been wanting to say all this time. It takes him hours to fall asleep, but eventually he falls asleep without realizing it, and then in the morning when Pete wakes up and goes out into the living room, his younger self is gone.

\--

A memory:

Winter, 2006 or 2007. Something like that. They’re in the back of Pete’s mom’s car, all of them going out for dinner to celebrate their being home, and Pete is sitting by the window and squashed happily up against Patrick’s side. “It’s so weird, it’s all these kids I _know, _from when we were in _high school,” _Patrick is saying, gesturing in bewilderment with his gloved hands. “Asking for my autograph. It’s like asking our old principal for an autograph or something. I mean, _why?” _

Pete is amused. “Obviously because you’re the star of the band.”

“I am not,” Patrick says, a little strangled.

“Are too.”

“Shut up.” Patrick turns his head away, the tips of his ears turning pink.

Pete isn’t wearing gloves, and his hands are cold. He insinuates one hand into Patrick’s armpit, and Patrick yelps. “Your hand’s fucking freezing,” he says, trying to bat Pete away.

“Yeah, that’s exactly why I’m trying to warm—“ Pete reaches around to stick his other hand into Patrick’s other armpit, and Patrick squirms away so violently that he falls into Andy’s lap, waking him up from his nap.

“Hey, boys, give it a rest,” Pete’s mom says from the front, at the exact same time Joe says from the passenger seat, “Jesus, do we need to separate you two?”

They both sober up then, straightening up and not looking at each other. But Patrick pulls off one glove with his teeth and throws it at Pete like he doesn’t care.

Pete puts the glove on, curling his fingers. “Thanks, man,” he says, and then he tucks his other arm into Patrick’s, resting his bare hand in the crook of Patrick’s elbow.

Patrick makes a small, huffing sort of sigh, but he doesn’t push Pete away.


	2. Chapter 2

  1. _ tuesday_

The thing is, Pete hasn’t heard from Patrick at all.

Joe and Andy, he’s still in touch with; they’ve texted each other, and even called once or twice in the past couple of years. And it’s been civil, like, they’re not children. But Patrick—not a peep. Pete thought that over the years, he’d seen and understood all the forms Patrick’s anger could take. That small annoyed pout he made. The impeccably worded snark. When it was really bad, the shouting and hurling things—notebooks, water bottles, paperweights—across the studio. But this, the complete scrubbing-out of Pete from Patrick’s life—no messages, no calls, moving on and leaving everything behind to rot? This was fucking cold.

Some small part of Pete hoped for a while. That one day he’d be playing a show, and look up and see Patrick right there in the audience, among a sea of strangers’ faces. That after the show they’d find each other and talk, and make their poetic apologies and forgive each other, and go for a drink and laugh about stupid shit, and all at once things would be fixed.

But Patrick wouldn’t do that; that’s not his style anymore. Pete is sure of that now.

The thing, too, is that Pete hadn’t seen the hiatus coming. All he knew when it did was that _hiatus _meant nothing good. That _hiatus _was just another word for _break, _and _break _meant _break up. _If he thinks too hard about the days leading up to it, it’s like a knife twisting in his gut—recalling how much Patrick loved working on _Folie,_ how smoothly he took the reins.

But at the same time, how he and Pete somehow wound up arguing over songs the way they hadn’t done since they were kids. Having those arguments escalate into shouting matches that somehow weren’t just about the music anymore, _do you always have to be such a stubborn asshole; do you always have to be such a nitpicking little bitch; you always do this, you always get angry because you know I’m fucking right; fuck you._

Sometimes, after a fight like that, Pete would look at Patrick; at the way his lips were pressed together and his eyes were lit up with tightly controlled anger, at how his shoulders went stiff as he angled his body away and kept his hands busy so he wouldn’t have to look at Pete—and Pete would feel an uncomfortable, ugly jolt of shock, because for a moment he genuinely thought he couldn’t recognize the person standing in front of him anymore. The words coming out of Patrick’s mouth, the way his body was moving. None of it.

Pete chalked it up to all of them just feeling the pressure, from wanting this to be good. But it _was_ going to be good, when they were done.

And then. Seeing what the reception of the album did to Patrick, how unbearably bitter the disappointment was, hanging over him, following him like a shadow. Pete always reaching out to Patrick, always chasing after him to tell him it was okay. And Patrick, instead of talking the way they always did, instead of going into Pete’s arms and leaning into him and letting himself be comforted for five minutes, just—pulling away even more, and it not getting any better as day after day after day went by, and Pete not understanding when this, the two of them, had changed, or _why._

“People hate it,” Patrick kept saying, hollowly, over and over. “They’re fucking booing us off the stage.”

“You’re exaggerating,” Pete would insist. “It’s one album. It’s a _blip,_ in all of this. And besides, who cares what they think? We’re _fine.”_ And Patrick would just press his lips together and shake his head and look away, and Pete would feel it like a slap in the face, like a hard shove.

It just didn’t compute. It didn’t make _sense._ Because if Patrick wanted to get away from everything, then Patrick wanted to get away from _Pete—_even when Pete was the one trying so hard to fix things, to keep them from falling apart. Even when Pete had also been feeling—like—

_We’re in this together, aren’t we?_ Pete demanded finally. _Or what, is that not what you want anymore? Are we not good enough for you anymore? If that’s what you think then fine, just fucking go. _And Patrick had, without so much as a backwards glance.

Pete always thought that if you went through the absolute worst years of your life together with someone, and you both survived it, you were supposed to be left with something unbreakable. Because isn’t that the point? Isn’t that what it was all _for?_

But whatever, Pete thought to himself, _two can play this game,_ and he’d started up the new band, and started writing songs again in a savage frenzy to prove to himself that he didn’t need Patrick to make magic, and he’d done it. If the others were all off doing the same thing on their own, then well and good.

And then, just earlier this year, Patrick posted that fucking essay, that beautiful, heartbreaking essay—about people still always wanting him to be who he was at eighteen, about the tidal wave of hatred he was sinking under, about loathing himself and feeling like he was such a failure. When Pete read it, and realized it had never been just about the album, he felt something inside his heart rearrange, and he thought, _Patrick, god, Patrick, why didn’t you_ tell_ me it was that bad? I would have done something to help. _

He’d wanted so badly to call Patrick then. He wants to now, but he still doesn’t know what to say. And it’s so elementary school, but part of Pete just wants to ask—_are you still mad at me?_ Even though he knows that wouldn’t even cover the half of it, with all the time and distance between them now.

The hiatus was supposed to be a cooling-off period. And it had all cooled off so much that it had frozen, and turned brittle, and shattered.

The plants really aren’t looking too hot. The bear’s paw is definitely browning, the Mexican snowball is weirdly—squashy, and the aloe is sagging so much its leaves are touching the floor.

“I believe in you, you know,” Pete tells them, and turns the pots to try to angle them towards the sunlight.

He considers going out to buy succulent fertilizer, if such a thing exists, but instead on a whim he texts Andy. _what’s up? hope you’ve been good._

Andy responds by calling, which Pete pretty much expected. “What’s up, Pete?”

Pete looks at his plants dolefully. “My succulents are dying.”

“Hmm.” There’s a light, stuttery tap on a cymbal; Andy’s at the drums, Pete realizes. “Have you ever heard of the theory of the consciousness of water?” Andy asks.

“I think so.” Pete scoots the snowball an inch closer to the window. “The thing about the molecules rearranging when you play them Mozart?”

“The Mozart is part of it, yeah. But mostly it’s about emotions. Write _I love you _on a bottle of water and the molecules look just like the inside of a kaleidoscope. But write _I hate you _and the molecules scatter.” Andy makes an explosion sound and brings his foot down on the kick drum pedal at the same time. Pete can imagine him flinging his hands out. “Chaos.”

“Okay, I buy that.” Pete tips his head back, looking up at the lightbulb. “I’m guessing you’re going to tell me how this is relevant next.”

“Well, humans are sixty percent water,” Andy says. “Water’s over seventy percent of your brain and your heart, too. And water senses itself in other things…”

Pete wrinkles his nose. “So what you’re saying is I don’t just have a brown thumb,” he says. “I have a brown…heart?”

He imagines Andy shrugging. “You said it, not me,” Andy says.

"Great. Thanks. I feel so much better."

Andy laughs. "How are you, Pete?"

"Not too bad. Keeping myself company." Pete looks down at his plants again. "How about you?"

"Oh, you know, I'm—"

A voice in the background of the call. “—gotta do one more, okay?” Joe.

Pete blinks, stunned by the sudden familiarity of Joe’s voice. “Oh, I’m—sorry, man, am I interrupting something?”

“It’s okay,” Andy says, even though Pete can tell he has to go soon.

“Is everything good?” Pete asks hurriedly. “I heard the new song the other day, by the way, it was killer.”

“Thanks. And yeah, we’re really good,” Andy tells him heartily. “I hope you are too. Listen…we’ll see you sometime, okay? Be nice to catch up.”

“Yeah. Of course. Tell—tell Joe I said hi.”

“I will,” Andy promises, and then they say goodbye, and he hangs up.

Pete lowers his phone. He hadn’t even been aware, but while on the call he’d been pacing back and forth in the middle of the floor, so much that there’s the beginning of a groove in the carpet. He smooths over it with the soles of his shoes, and then, standing there, he gets a feeling, so he goes outside.

The kid—the much littler kid, eleven-year-old Pete—is standing in front of the steps of his house. His bike is parked carelessly next to him, its front wheel wedged between the bars of the fence. He has a soccer ball, and he’s dribbling it between his feet, kicking it against the bottom step.

The kid bounces the ball harder off a step higher up; headbutts it when it comes sailing back. “We had to write poems in English this year,” is the first thing he says.

Pete catches the ball. He lowers it to the ground and gently nudges it with his toe, so it goes bouncing down the steps. “Huh. What did you write about?”

Pete-11 snorts like, _yeah right._ “I can’t _tell_ you,” he says, swiping the ball back. “They’re _private.”_

But the kid does share one poem later, while they’re having ice cream. He orders a hot fudge sundae, and Pete thinks _screw it,_ and gets himself a strawberry sundae with chocolate sauce and a shitton of sprinkles. They sit out at one of the outdoor tables, and that’s when the kid takes a crumpled notebook page from his pocket and slides it over.

“It’s whatever, you don’t even have to read it,” he says with a noncommittal shrug. Then Pete-11 pretends to be very busy eating his ice cream, even though Pete Prime can see him watching out of the corner of his eye to see if he’s reading it.

So Pete smooths it out and reads it. He doesn’t remember writing it at all, but it sounds exactly like something he would have written at that age. Handwriting even more of a mess, too.

_Last night I was an airplane and my arms were the wings_

_Soaring high over the city, that’s how I know the moon sings_

_The air’s like ice up there but only I know how to breathe it_

_And I know the ground is safer but only I want to leave it_

_Sometimes I feel like I’m walking around on a sheet of plastic _

_Taped over the world instead of in it, and that’s not fantastic_

_And everyone says hearts are red, but I think mine is purple_

_I know there isn’t a rhyme for that. Someday I’ll make one myself._

“It’s good,” Pete says quietly. He hands the notebook page back.

“It is?” Pete-11 tries to keep the surprise from his voice, because he’s cool. “So like…you get it?”

Pete nods slowly. “I do.”

“Oh.” Pete-11 stares down at the page for a moment, before folding it up hurriedly and putting it back in his pocket. “I lied,” he says after a while. “This one wasn’t for English class. It was just for me.”

“I know.” Pete pauses. “Hey, this is probably a stupid question, but bear with me for a sec.” He scoops up some of the ice cream-and-sprinkle soup at the bottom of his glass. “What…makes you want to write poems? Is it because you love it?”

Pete-11 scrunches his nose up. “I don’t know if I _love_ it. But it’s like, the stuff in my head is there, but it’s so—so—“ The kid makes a huge, vague gesture. “No real words, y’know? So I just have to make ‘em up. Put them together in different ways until they mean what I want them to mean. Well, not exactly the same, but close enough.”

_Yeah,_ Pete thinks. It’s exactly like that. “So do you want to be a lyricist?”

“A what?”

“A lyricist. You want to write songs?”

“Oh.” Pete-11 frowns again. “I mean, I guess I could. But not like, as my _job_ or anything.”

Pete is surprised. “No?”

“Not really. I mean, I thought about what you said, and I know you said I’m gonna be in bands and stuff, but I figure that’s gonna be like, my side hobby.” Pete-11 scrapes a large glob of fudge into his spoon, but Pete stops himself from saying anything about it. “I decided that mostly I want to play soccer,” the kid says. “I’m gonna be a famous soccer player. Oh, and an astronaut. I could start the first ever soccer tournament in _space.”_

Pete doesn’t know, why the kid’s answer makes him feel unsettled. But all he says is, "Yeah, man. Soccer in space sounds really cool."

Pete-11 makes an indignant noise. _"Obviously."_

He looks at the map of scabs on Pete-11’s arms, still healing. “Must’ve hurt,” Pete comments. “When you fell off your bike.”

Kid shrugs. “Not really.”

“No?”

“Nope.” Pete-11 swipes the back of his hand over his chocolate-covered mouth. “Dad says no wonder I play soccer. I bounce off everything, and everything bounces off me.” He tries in vain to lick chocolate off the end of his nose. “Hey, you got like, an extra Kleenex or something?”

Pete closes his eyes. God, seeing the kid like this is making him feel like he’s on the verge of a meltdown. He wishes he could shield him from everything that’s coming somehow, protect him from the whole stupid world, but he knows he can’t.

Pete-11 is peering at him when he opens his eyes. “Are you _crying?”_

Pete laughs, a little hoarsely. “No.” He picks up a napkin, makes to wipe his eyes with it, then thinks better of it and wipes his mouth instead.

The kid doesn’t look convinced. “You’re really weird, you know that?”

“I know.” Pete shoves another napkin across the table, then reaches over and ruffles Pete-11’s hair. Pete-11 ducks his head, but his cheeks turn pink.

They go to the park to kick the soccer ball around for a while, play some one-on-one. At first Pete tries to hold back, for the kid’s sake—but when the kid immediately starts stealing the ball and scoring goals between the trees, crowing in triumph, Pete realizes his mistake in underestimating him. The game gets more interesting after that, Pete throwing himself into it and actually struggling to catch his breath as he runs, and they wind up deciding to call it on a tie.

“Are you sad?” Pete-11 asks unexpectedly, while they’re just idly passing the ball back and forth to cool down.

He’d forgotten, that kids were this blunt. Pete kicks the ball back with just enough force, watches it roll away in a slow line. “Yeah,” he says finally. “I think I’m sad.”

Pete-11 appears to think about this. “Is it ‘cause you’re lonely?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Kick. Pete-11 sends the ball back. “You’ll be okay.”

Pete stops it with his foot. Kick. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Pete-11 flips the ball up into his hands, plops down in the grass with his legs sprawled out. “I mean, I know I always am. So I figure you always will be.”

Pete crosses and folds his legs underneath him to sit next to him. “Huh. Well, that’s good to know.”

They sit on the grass and watch the sun set over the water, the night fluttering gently down. At some point, the kid gets up and leaves. He doesn’t say goodbye, and Pete doesn’t turn to watch him go.

Thanks to Pete-21, Pete at least has one new song. Now to figure out how to make the rest of the detritus he’s collected into music. How to piece it together and refine it and make it make sense. There isn’t anyone else to do that for him, now.

Even with the hundreds of times he’s written songs before, Pete somehow feels like he has nothing to go on at all. Like he’s doing this for the very first time. He wonders briefly if Patrick felt like this, when he started writing on his own.

_No screaming. Save that shit for your diary,_ twenty-one-year-old Pete had said.

His diary.

A while back, Brendon had asked if he could use a line from one of Pete’s old LJ posts in a song. The one that goes _put another X on the calendar, summer’s on its deathbed._ Pete hadn’t remembered the line at the time, hadn’t even wanted to check his own journal to find it, but he’d told Brendon sure. At least his words were doing something for someone.

It takes him a couple of tries with the password, but Pete’s eventually able to log into Livejournal. He scrolls through all his old entries and doesn’t remember writing them. So much he doesn’t remember.

And then he sees the private entries, and doesn’t remember those either, so he stops and looks at one. And it’s about Patrick. It doesn’t say so, but reading the first paragraph alone—he knows.

_hey you. i’m writing this while you’re off somewhere in dreamland and i’m still here with my stupid bleary 3 am eyes. i guess because i was just thinking about what you said earlier, when you asked ‘did you ever imagine it being like this?’ and i said no. even though i’ve always known we were meant to be _something, _i could never imagine what it would _feel_ like. because who can ever really imagine it, being the fucking happiest they’re ever going to be? _

_remember when we saw that fox by the side of the highway? how the headlights passed over it and we saw its eyes shining in the night, and we just stopped and looked at it looking at us, and then it vanished into the desert like smoke. that one moment like a secret, random, perfect miracle. lately i’ve been feeling like life is just that—an endless series of foxes in the dark. and it’s good. it’s better than good._

_do you know for the first time ever i feel like i can breathe? like i didn’t even know what breathing was before, like air is the only thing i need to eat now to live, and suddenly i have someone feeding it to me piece by raw, shining piece. you’ve seen the inside of my head, all the dark corners and the thousands upon thousands of madly spinning gears, and you stay anyway. i think most days i am still trying to figure out why. you make me want to make myself better. you make me not so alone. you are the most incredible person to ever exist and you don’t even realize it. _

_and it’s you. it’s always been you. in a peter gabriel outside the window, back pocket of your jeans, all my college fund on a pair of earrings kind of way. i’d tell you in person, but that part i think you already know. i hope your dreams are good. i’ll see you when you get back._

There are more. So many more. It’s like opening a wound, reading them. A wound in his chest, in his throat, somewhere at the base of his spine. Pete swallows the lump in his throat and looks away for a moment. Then he goes back to the entry where he’d written the calendar line. _There is simply nothing worse than knowing the ending, _he’d said.

Pete deletes that entry, and then a couple of others. Then he looks at all the private entries, and deletes all of them too. Now it’s like they were never there. In a few years, even he’ll have forgotten they existed.

\--

A memory:

They’re in their room backstage, and Patrick and Joe are on the sofa and Andy is sitting on the floor, and Pete is rooting around inside his speaker backpack and he’s saying, “I have a grand theory.” He pulls out a sandwich bag full of crumbs and tosses it to the floor. “Do you wanna hear it?”

“Is this anything like your grand theory about how the frozen corpse of Walt Disney is not only buried underneath the foundations of Disneyland, but actually being used in a decades-long black magic ritual to fuel theme park operations?” Joe asks mildly.

Pete dumps the backpack into Patrick’s lap and starts digging through the duffel bag next. Patrick groans and shoves the backpack off his knees. “Aha,” Pete says triumphantly, and yanks out a pen.

The pen cap goes flying and hits Patrick in the eye. “The _fuck,”_ Patrick says, clapping his hand over it.

“Sorry, dude. No, wait. Listen.” Pete waves the pen in the air. “Last week, I bought a pack of ten of these, and now I’ve lost _nine_ of them. But I remember in high school, I literally only ever owned one pen at a time, and I never lost any of them, ever.” He spreads his arms wide. “So my theory is that ironically, the more you have of something, the more you tend to lose it, so you wind up having none of it in the end. But if you only have one, then you hold onto it and take care of it. ‘Cause you know it’s the only one. Yeah?”

On the sofa, Patrick has grown very still. Meanwhile, Joe is frowning. “Does this not just mean you’re careless with your stuff?” he asks.

“No, I think he’s onto something,” Andy chimes in. “Actually, I think what’s really going on could be even more sinister—it’s the universe mistaking duplicates for clones, anomalies in the space-time continuum. So it’s swallowing up what it believes to be the false pens, thus leaving behind the One True Pen.”

_“Thank_ you, Andrew.” Pete extends a hand. “Patrick?”

Patrick wrinkles his nose at him. “Your one about the Waltsicle was better,” he says flatly, and gets up to get a soda.

“Sourpuss. This’ll cheer you up.” Pete hits a button on his iPod, and his backpack starts blaring ABBA.

“Goddammit, not the—“ Patrick scrambles away from the sofa and makes a run for it.

“Oh, come on, Tricky, you can’t deny _there’s a fire within your soul,” _Pete yells, running after him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> she's back, baby
> 
> If anyone was waiting for updates to this, I'm sorry for the long hiatus (ahaha). But being in quarantine for the foreseeable future means I'm in kind of a weird sad headspace most of the time, hence me returning to this fic now to let some of it out. 
> 
> Wherever you are in the world, I hope you're safe and that your loved ones are too--and if you want it to, that fandom is providing a safe haven for you. <333


End file.
